Culture's Value
Displaying 11 - 20 of 20 articles
Recently I got told this joke. Two economists are having lunch. One of them has to make a decision about changing jobs, moving cities, disrupting his family and so on. What should he do, he asks the other…
The past two years have not been happy ones for the arts sector in Australia. It all began in early 2014 with federal Ministers Brandis and Turnbull telling artists at the Sydney Biennale that they were…
The organisation Senator George Brandis described as having an “iron wall” around it, is refreshing its sentinels. This week’s announcement of four new appointments to the Australia Council Board represents…
In one of those abyssal silences that punctuate official Thinkfests when artists have to come up with new policy ideas that don’t involve asking governments for more money, I once facetiously suggested…
The first Australian National Playwrights Centre (ANPC) was founded in 1973 – the age of bongs, thongs and social wrongs. Australian drama was by then well into its Biggest Renaissance Ever. The Pram Factory…
You can drive across Singapore (population 5.5 million) in 45 minutes – roughly the same time it takes to reach Gawler from the Adelaide CBD. As an equatorial island, the climate is warm all the year round…
For the comic protagonist, the literary critic Northrop Frye once observed, life is something you get through. While tragic characters die in plangent splendour, and Marvel superheroes vanquish tech-spangled…
In the words of Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger, “the injustice of it is almost perfect”. Last week, Jason Potts argued here that the cuts made to around 60 cultural organisations under the Australia…
In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was “innovation” – at least, it was this time round. In 2015, the Word was “excellence”. And in the antediluvian era of the 1980s and 1990s, the Word was, variously…
In Adelaide on Tuesday, a hundred-plus arts practitioners of different backgrounds rallied on the steps of Parliament House to protest one thing they all have in common: poor future prospects. In the lead…